Books That Saved My Life

If I were to write “reality” in quotes, as David Shields does in the first page of his new book Reality Hunger, you might think I’d been hitting the Sartre a little heavily. Despite our post-post-modernism ideals, when we talk about reality we still generally mean “something uniformly true.” As an agreed-upon consensus, however, reality requires plenty of daily effort in its construction. In Rawi Hage’s book, Cockroach, the main character has lost the will to keep putting out the effort.

The main character of Cockroach calls himself a thief, though he rarely steals anything—preferring to try on people’s shoes, read their letters, even imagine he’s entering their dreams. “I see people for what they are,” says the thief, “I strip them of everything and see their hollowness.  I strip them, and they are relieved of the burden of color and disguise.”

The thief is part of an immigrant community in Montreal and his name, like his ethnicity, is never quite clear (he calls himself a “hairy Arab” but his history seems Lebanese, although since Lebanon itself is a mishmash of cultures that hardly clarifies things). The author, himself an immigrant living in Canada, settles us firmly inside his main character’s head by describing not just the thief’s perceptions but his vivid stream-of-consciousness. When the thief presses his nose to a restaurant window he doesn’t just see well-heeled customers having business meetings, he sees a maitre-d who guards the boundaries between worlds—“the hunger police.”

At the beginning of Cockroach the thief tells us he has recently tried to commit suicide, and throughout the book he has elaborate fantasies of escape.  Sweeping the floor in a restaurant, he imagines he is a cockroach picking up the crumbs people drop, tasting their saliva, their innermost thoughts, then slipping down the drain into the river of, well, human sewage, that flows under the city.

Hage’s first book, DeNiro’s Game (which pretty much swept the literary awards in Canada, where it was first published), deals with similar themes.  It’s main character, Bassam, is a teenager who dreams of escaping the bloody civil wars in Lebanon—its daily funerals, houses with their roofs left open to the sky—and his fantasies seep into every fiber of his life. Although technically not a sequel, Cockroach follows immigrants who have successfully escaped war-torn homelands only to find the past has followed them.

Beyond paying homage to Kafka in the title, Cockroach is reminiscent of the Metamorphosis in that it takes place almost entirely inside the head of a character whose reality has been badly confounded. Although Hage’s book builds to a climactic finale, the real focus is on the thief’s rich fantasy life.  The book falls somewhere between realism and surrealism and reading it one gets the feeling that the violent clashes of history are being replayed in the battle between survival and the desire to escape into dreams.

-MW